Freeing slaves/prisoners?
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Hello everyone!
Is there an option to free slaves (the ones in your cargo hold)?
At the moment, all I can see is either make them part of your crew, throw them overboard or sell them.
The player can free captured enemy captains, resulting in disposition changes to one’s officers and the like. I think that such an option should be available for all prisoners/slaves.
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Interesting conversation. I had a discussion of this on one of our Youtube videos where I talk about dumping slaves at shores so they can escape. I go so far as to dump a little food as well for part of the immersion – getting into the role play. I believe I talk about this in the old features here in an article I wrote about “gamesmanship”.
Slavery is as old as the world and there are some interesting additional things to consider. The abolitionist movement had not even began yet during the timeframe of our game. However, the moral discussion of slavery was very much alive at the time of our favored ERA.
If you are really interested in learning something about this I suggest you read the review I wrote on Bennerson Little’s book in our reviews section. The Spaniards viewed slavery as a great evil and would not allow trading in slaves in accordance with repartmiento law. This caused all kinds of black market deals to happen. The English early on forced Spanish towns to buy their slaves at gun point. There was a lively market in smuggled slaves from Curacao to Caracas and Coro for most of the 17th century after the establishment of Willemstad in the 1630s.
The slaves that originally were brought into the Spanish American mainland to build the great cities of Mexico ended up concentrated around Vera Cruz. Many of these became paid soldier but that didn’t last long after the great slave uprising of Gaspar Yanga. Yanga fought the Spaniards for over thirty years and freed huge amounts of slaves in the region. They built their own free black township in the mountains north of Vera Cruz – the first in the history of the new world. They got their freedom and forced the Spanish to recognize their independence by treaty. The town and province still exist today. I do not understand why this isn’t taught in schools.
The enlightenment thinkers wrestled with the subject as well and those egalitarian ideas made their way into discussions among the more intellectual and educated pirate captains. Just look through our characters (30 more coming BTW) to get an idea of how many highly educated and even ex-nobility personalities were in our Caribbean of the 17th century. Those ideas spread like ripples. Several notable scholars have theorized that black sailors/pirates were often over 20 percent of the crews at an average – sometimes more – with notables among them (some of them characters in our game) and most were ex-slaves.
One additional note is the “Maroons” – slaves who were freed or who escaped and formed their own remote hidden island communities. I plan to eventually put in a Maroon community in our game. The only place I’ve ever seen this represented in the pirate media strata is the series Black Sails and it is a very interesting and essential part of the series plot.
In the early 18th century the Spaniards finally granted the English “Grand Assiento” rights to trade in slaves – mainly to Cuba – because they wanted to develop it as the greatest sugar entrepot in the world. Repartmeinto law which had allowed the temporary enslavement of native Americans to train them in learning Spanish and Christianity while employing them with wages in forced labor, became a passe and obsolete practice by 1700. The largest single influx of slaves brought to the New World was in those decades after the War of Spanish Succession (post 1715).
The desire to force the sales of slaves across Spanish America as a whole is a large part of what drove the War of Jenkins Ear to happen in 1739-1748.
I DO think it would be a good idea to get a goodly rep boost from freeing captured slave cargoes, but not sure how we would accomplish that.
One last thing I would mention is that white slaves were also a thing during our era. Cromwell during his “Great Western Design” timeframe granted huge landgrants in the New World to soldiers who had been loyal to the Roundhead cause during the English Civil War. This is what caused Jamaica to be wrested from the Spaniards and also why all of the increased settling of English migrants on Saint Kitts, Barbados and Belize occurred simultaneous to that. Captured royalist soldiers were not all put to death by a long shot. Most lived and were brought to the new world as white slaves. This practice continued through Charles II’s and James II’s rule after the Restoration of the Monarchy. White Traitors, convicts, and debtors were transported to the New World as white slaves. Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685 and the Bloody Assizes caused a large influx of white slaves into the Caribbean that year. If fact that’s the backdrop for Sabatini’s novel Captain Blood who himself came to the Caribbean as ONE of those white slaves.
MK (Aaron)
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by peter